
Gimkit Pro is the paid subscription tier for Gimkit educator accounts. It removes game mode restrictions, unlocks homework assignment tools, and lets teachers attach images and audio to questions. Every new educator account starts with a 14-day free trial before the plan reverts to Basic.
Gimkit Pro vs Gimkit Basic: Key Differences
Every educator gets Gimkit Basic for free with no expiry. Basic includes unlimited student participation per live session, class rostering, and performance ...

I’ve stared a new Navidrome library for FLAC files. Yay!
Starting fresh with a new library has given me the opportunity to carefully import each album one by one, verify their metadata, make sure they have the correct cover art, and add more touchy-feely attributes like “mood” which matter to me more now than genre.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-18. I’ve stared a new Navidrome library for FLAC files. Yay!
Starting fresh with a new library has given me the opportunit...
When is AI image slop ok?
By Gordon Mclean
Gordon stumbled across a post arguing that AI-generated featured images signals laziness, even if every word you write is your own, and it made him stop and think about his own blog.
Read post ➡
This post piqued my interest, and surprise suprise, I have opinions. 🙃
I've spoken about my opinions on AI and image generation before and my opinion hasn't changed on that. I have, however, switched from ChatGPT to Claude, for reason...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com .
Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter .
People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members.
If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.
Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudo...
Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard ), the fastest RISC-V option ( DC-ROMA II ), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC , which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM.
My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of Theseus'. Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end...
The proof of work is the wrong analogy: finding hash collisions, while exponentially harder with N, is guaranteed to find, with enough work, some S so that H(S) satisfies N, so an asymmetry of resources used will see the side with more "work ability" eventually winning.
But bugs are different:
1. Different LLMs executions take different branches, but eventually the possible branches based on the code possible states are saturated.
2. If we imagine sampling the model for a bug in a given...
Hello fine reader of my blog! This is a brief note to highlight that as of a couple of years ago I stopped cross-posting from my newsletter to this blog, so if you would like to receive new blog, ahem, newsletter posts, please resubscribe in your favorite feed reader using https://newsletter.dancohen.org/rss , or you can subscribe by email or other methods at https://newsletter.dancohen.org . Thanks! I have been actively posting on the newsletter and would appreciate the audience that has ...

We talk here sometimes about how to test SQL dialects with tools like TLP and PQS . One really nice property of those tools is that they let you treat the database like a blackbox.
I'm tinkering with a little SQL planner to mess around with ideas and one feature I added very early was an explicit optimization fence operator that simply blocks any optimizations:
In a query like this:
SELECT * FROM ( SELECT a , b , c , d FROM foo , bar WHERE a = c ) WHERE b...

Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism , or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions , democracy , or police brutality . Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan , but the big anti-AI institutions are labor unions and the progressive wing of the Democrats.
This has always seemed weird to me, because the contents of most anti-AI arguments are actually right-wing coded. They’re not nece...

For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent years developing new codes that appear to be safe from future safecrackers armed with quantum computers. At the same time, they’ve also devised ingenious ways to use the rules of…
Source For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eve...

In the first lab note in this series, I introduced the task framework and motivated it with a few examples. In this note, I’ll give you a more concrete picture of the framework — the set of concepts you need to understand in order to use it — and walk you through its implementation.
Cast of characters
Each user has a pool of task workers that can run tasks from a set of task queues that user contributes work to.
A task is a unit of work. It has some code to run, an optional i...
State of the Browser (2026) It’s 10PM: Do You Know Where Your JavaScript Is?
www.zachleat.com
This talk was given at State of the Browser (2026) . Check out the event talk page (which includes a talk transcript, too).
We’ll talk about best practices to either reduce (or increase!) the JavaScript footprint on your web site to a sweet and very practical spot for best results. It’s far more common to have too much JavaScript on your web site, but can you go too far? Is zero JavaScript a worthwhile goal? Let’s talk about it!
Video
Wa...
At Oxford I focused my research and discussions on how we can use the tools of computational complexity to help us understand the power and limitations of machine learning. Last week I posted my paper How Does Machine Learning Manage Complexity? , a first step in this direction. Let me give a broad overview of the paper. Please refer to the paper for more technical details. Instead of focusing on the machine learning concepts like neural nets, transformers, etc., I wanted to abstract out a mode...
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected.
This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected. This is an external post of mine. Click
here
if you are not redirected. here

I’ve been messing around with local LLMs on my 3090 for a while now — I have a growing collection of Qwen models on D:\LLM that I probably should be embarrassed about. A few weeks ago I stumbled across David Noel Ng’s LLM Neuroanatomy blog posts, where he showed that you can take a pretrained transformer and literally just re-run some of its middle layers a second time at inference, no retraining needed, and get meaningfully better outputs.
The D:\LLM folder. I should probably ...
Tucked in a tiny timed capsule against its wonky, worldly windows mesmerized the momentary Moonfarers at sweeping sights of Selene Creased by craters and crowning peaks melts and mountains molded in weeks amid barrages of ballistically laid beads lingered the landscape of Luna What the world could view is impact not as distant through the capsule crew For a world bent and battered showed that it wasn’t shattered that it was weathered, not withered trembled, not tamed or tattered Just like the ...
Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year
simonwillison.net
This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013.
If you're based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people...

Click to get it full-size front and back!
I’m the guy who does “monsters on a business card” posts, and I just started at MCDM, so I should probably do a Draw Steel Monsters on a Business Card, right?
Well it turns out I don’t have to! Amber over at amby.navy did it for me!
If you’re new to DS, there are a lot of new terms here and it may look intimidating! Luckily, it’s all spelled out in a few pages in the introduction of Draw Steel: Monsters . (No reverse engineering req...

0.0 Context Setting
It’s Thursday, 16 April, 2026 and unseasonably cold in Portland, Oregon. Before that, it was unseasonably warm. This jackpot sucks.
Oh right, there’s also a podcast feed for, uh, some podcast episodes.
Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on LibSyn
Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on Apple Podcasts
Let’s just get on with the thing that caught my attention.
1.0 Things That Caught My Attention
1.1 It’s (not) the economy, stupid...
Why not use a syntax highlighting library? These libraries take text as input and produce HTML as output. But on these interactive pages, the input is HTML. I have manually marked up the code with embedded interactive elements that respond to the reader's choices:
The syntax highlighting libraries I looked at don't work on HTML out of the box. It's possible to merge two highlighters together but it can be tricky. Let's see what the merging looks like. To keep the examples concise...
Airbus and Lakota Connector Partners Successfully Execute Fourth Autonomous Flight Test Period
shield.ai
WASHINGTON – (March 30, 2026) – Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, in partnership with Shield AI, L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), and Parry Labs, completed its fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 Airbus helicopter and successfully integrated all four company’s technologies into a single aircraft together for the first time.
The test flights, which took place at the Airbus facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, focused on refining the aircraft’s perception system to ensure it provi...
I don’t think I’ll ever actually write Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code ,
but if I do,
I’ll frame it as, “Big tech is like…”
and then spend two or three pages on each of the following:
…a Drug Cartel
…a Company Town
…the Medieval Church
…a Hollywood Studio
…a Fast Food Franchise
…a Patent Medicine Company
…a Protection Racket
…a Supermarket Chain
…a Department Store
…a Credit Card Network
…a Credit Bureau
…a Private Military Contracto...

I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host
Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage . The video runs for about half-an-hour.
I always enjoy nattering with Kent like this, and Gergely pushed into some worthwhile topics. Given
the timing, AI dominated the conversation - we compared it to earlier
technology shifts, the experience of agile methods, the role of TDD, the
danger of unhealthy performance metrics, and how to thrive in an AI-native
in...